


Get Out Of Jail Free

by Ark



Category: Vampire Diaries (TV)
Genre: M/M, Missing Scene, Slash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-03-17
Updated: 2012-03-17
Packaged: 2017-11-02 01:55:19
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,315
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/363721
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ark/pseuds/Ark
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Missing scene from "1912": Damon's the one to let Alaric out.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Get Out Of Jail Free

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to [pleasebekidding](http://archiveofourown.org/users/pleasebekidding) for encouraging writing in the missing bits. Spoilers for 3x16.

Somehow Damon convinces Liz Forbes to be the one to let Alaric out.

He comes strolling down the hall with a weighted sheriff's walk, and Alaric knows Damon wishes the key came on a big shiny brass ring. Pirate style.

They'd play this out more if it weren't so fucked up.

Alaric's been locked in the cell for endless hours, trapped, accused of things he knows he doesn't want to have any part of, which is different than knowing he didn't do them.

So many questions that don't have a right ending or an answer, only endless hours in a cage like an animal. His loved ones doing god-knows-what in his name, making everything somehow even more fucked than it already was. This is, by far, one of the most fucked-up situations he has ever been in, and Alaric Saltzman is used to a great deal of fuckery. Climbs a mountain of it daily.

They'd play this out more if it weren't so fucked up.

But it's totally fucked, and there are no games and grins between them when Damon first rounds the bend.

Damon is very quick to the lock, quick to set him free. Alaric is up from the low hard cot and pressed to the bars, has been since the first of Damon's footsteps. He'd know the sound if he were drowning. He's up and ready to be free.

"Elena," says Alaric, and Damon says, "She's waiting for you at the house. Donovan's with her. Lots of puppy dog stares, but they're both fine."

Alaric says, "Meredith?" and Damon has the gotten the heavy tumbler to work and click and is dragging the screeching gate sideways. For a moment Damon doesn't say anything and Alaric isn't quite sure if he wants to hear that she's been visited by Damon's unique sense of justice or not.

After uneasy weeks, she'd shot him horribly, used her stolen vampire reserve blood as a fix-'er-up, then delivered him to sweating purgatory. Why he'd even entertained the woman's friendship was hard to say. Maybe because she was one of the few people in his age group who knew what they all were and hadn't seemed to give a shit, and that had seemed interesting. Next time he'd be more discriminating in day-drinking buddies.

Damon shakes his head, glances aside as though the subject might explode if directly examined. "I don't know. Been a little...distracted."

"I know you did this somehow, you and Elena," says Alaric, pushing his body through the first space that appears in the cell door. "Thank you, Damon."

"I'm a regular Sherlock Holmes," Damon says, and when Alaric's clear moves to shove him bodily back up against the bars. He's much more gentle about it than he would be if everything weren't so fucked up.

“Granted,” Damon acknowledges, all of him reacquainting with Alaric's personal space, “Stefan and Matt Donovan also pulled their weight. It was a screwy Scooby Gang but we found the hidden strings in the end.”

Why they kept him in custody in a bloody shirt Alaric can't say but he's still wearing the dark blue button-down, accessorized now with a prominent shot through the shoulder. Underneath he's mostly healed but there's too much crusted blood on the cloth to escape Damon's notice now that he's close.

Damon bites off a growl, somehow converting it into a frown at the last. Noses into the crook of Alaric's neck instead, then up, to kiss him much harder than he's holding him, which is still like Alaric might be made of eggshells.

Takes a lot more to make Alaric feel fragile than being betrayed and nearly being dead again and accused of horrible things while the only people he cared about scampered around trying to vindicate him with a serial killer on the loose while he was locked up and mocked by Mystic Falls' finest for hours that never, ever ended.

Really, it did.

"Ric, you OK?" Damon breaks off the kiss, which Alaric thinks must've been really great but he couldn't quite pay attention. "Your heartbeat's going nuts."

Alaric flips them in one, is free, has Damon pinned up against the too-thick metal bars. Over the many hours Alaric had devised a good number of cunning escape plans, but the bars had always been the primary problem. He had also, conveniently enough, imagined a scenario somewhat like this with Damon, hadn't in his wildest dreams thought they'd get to be here like this.

But Alaric reeks too much of stale sweat and dried blood, and he's never felt so tired, and he can't remember the last time he felt more at sea. Damon's an excellent flotation device but they can't do this here, not here, not now. He needs to be gone from here now.

"Wasn't sure what you'd be in the mood for," Damon admits, reading into the tense set of Alaric's spine, his too-tight shoulders and too-slack hands. "I compelled the deputy to stay away just in case. But we'll come back another time, pay them back for this with some jailhouse rock. I think it's time to go home."

"I don't have a home," Alaric hears himself say. He's leaning too heavily against Damon who's framed by metal. Damon smells of sweat too, of too much goddamned dashing around to try and save Alaric from himself.

Damon cocks his head. Says, unblinking, "That's true. You have quite a few. Which should we go to first?" and Alaric bends to kiss him once more, making Damon be the last impression of prison.

They get the fuck out of there, get the fuck out of the parking lot, and Damon drives as if he never met a speed limit he liked to Alaric's loft, as instructed.

Damon starts the shower while Alaric paces across the dark apartment, tearing free of his clothes with every step until they're all kicked ruined aside. Naked in the kitchen, he drinks two glasses of bourbon and two of cranberry juice and eats a sandwich roughly the size of a small village.

By then the bathroom's steamy and Damon is naked too, and under the water in the shower Damon is all over him. The bullet wound has partially faded from vampire blood but it still mars Alaric's shoulder an angry red.

Damon is angry then and makes at least two attempts to exit the tub so that he can tear the good Dr. Fell's heart out, he explains, but Alaric persuades him to stay with his mouth and a knowing hand fitted tight to the base of Damon's cock.

He tries to wash all the dirt and dread of the day away under the water but it won't get hot enough, won't go to the scalding he needs.

"What do you need?" asks Damon when they're toweling off. Doesn't have to be psychic or a vampire or a psychic vampire to ask.

Alaric's shut up and must look shut down, still too locked in despite the lack of jail cell. There are shadows under his eyes and it's taking far too much willpower to keep his hands from shaking. More than usual.

Alaric lets out a breath he hadn't realized he was holding. "Shit if I know," he says, because it's too many things, so many things, and he tosses the wet towel. Seems suddenly stupid to perform actions like hang towels neatly on hooks, to waste time like that.

Damon says, more carefully than suggestively, "Would it help -- somewhat -- if I fucked you until you can't see straight? Then we can head to doppelganger central, but if we go back like this you're going to freak Elena out."

"I am?" Through the fog, Alaric can see himself a little in the mirror over the sink. Thinks he looks like himself, maybe a shade more wrung and strung out than usual.

Damon nods wisely. "You look like you're not quite sure who you are at present. I know the look. Trust me, Elena doesn't like it."

Alaric says, "Am I freaking you out?"

"Always and forever," answers Damon, back-stepping him out of the bathroom.

"Yes," says Alaric, apropos of everything. "Yeah. To the first. It would help somewhat a lot if you fucked me until I can't see straight."

"Happens to be one of my specialties," says Damon, now fully a-smirk. He keeps walking Alaric back toward the bed, then speeds and tumbles them over in a heap of limbs when he decides Alaric isn't moving fast enough.

Alaric lands hard on the unmade sheets with Damon already hard against his thigh. "Think you can fuck me until I forget who I am?'

Damon tips his head, as though considering. "Maybe," he concedes at last, then smirks even broader. "But I don't fuck other people." A beat. “Not when in my right mind, at least.”

So he only fucks him until Alaric can't see anything but Damon, or feel anything but Damon in him, Damon on him and against him, Damon's wet hot mouth and Damon's tongue and Damon's neon eyes, Damon's hard-muscled strong lithe limbs, the carved cut of Damon's abs, his magnificent ass and extraordinary cock, the sandpaper stubble of Damon's cheek on his skin, Damon's, Damon's, everything of Damon in Alaric and all of Alaric made of Damon.

Afterward, Damon spends too long looking down at him, spends time they don't have, traces the lines that run across Alaric's forehead. They've been there for as long as they've known each other but Alaric knows that Damon is exactly aware of every way he's aged every day, that Damon observes and catalogues the changes with fascination and frustration. The expressive lift of Alaric's brow has cut deeper as of late.

"You look more like yourself now," Damon observes, with no small amount of self-satisfaction. "Internally tortured but well-fucked."

“Still freakish?” asks Alaric, then closes his eyes and lets himself just feel Damon's surprisingly gentle touch. Everything's still all fucked up but at least he's free and fed and clean and and has been thoroughly screwed to within an inch of walking, let alone seeing.

All too soon there'll be comforting Elena and too many remaining questions without proper endings. But he and Damon tangled up in bed can have that a moment longer.

Damon says, “Freaky, yeah, like a high school history teacher who hunts vampires while in a relationship with a particularly fabulous one. Freaky like a dude who can tell the difference between bourbons blindfolded _from smell_ and spends his remaining off-hours protecting America's Top Teenager. But other than that, you'll pass.”

“Thanks,” says Alaric, drily, but means it. They lie close together until the bedside clock treacherously rounds into a new hour. They get dressed, Alaric in fresh clothes, Damon's for once untorn and steamed from their shower.

Then Damon drives him to another of Alaric's homes. All the lights are on in the ground floor of the Gilbert house, an open challenge to shadows.

“You better go on,” Damon says, killing the engine. “Elena's none to thrilled with _moi_. But I think I'm making progress with Stefan, so you'll offer my apologies to the lovely lady for not quite giving a good damn. I can't do Dawson's Creek with her right now, Ric.”

“Don't worry about it,” Alaric says. “She's got enough on her plate at the moment. And if what you say about Stefan's true, we won't have to be concerned about distracting her so much anymore.”

“Godspeed,” says Damon, tilting over the armrest to kiss Alaric soundly, molding their doubled forms into the leather of the seat. When they move back, both of their faces are set to equal echoed masks of grim resolution for the tasks ahead.

The night Meredith Fell shot Alaric, he was supposed to have gone at the end of it to his third home, the Salvatore boarding house. He never went.

It was small surprise that Damon was the first thing he saw in the cell when he woke up, that Damon had gone to inquire of Liz Forbes before the sheriff could call herself.

The morning before he'd gotten shot, it had just been him and Damon lazy in bed, whispering words. More than Alaric's shoulder aches now, filled with a sudden apprehension that after all of this is settled they'll never get to be that easy again. The feeling coils leaden in his gut and cuts too close, like well-known knives.

But just like that morning, Damon says against Alaric's mouth, “I love you, you know. Come over later when you can, all right?”

Alaric agrees to all of it just like he had that morning, and presses his lips once more to Damon's. They hold over seatbelts. Then Alaric has to pull away, has to move away and open the door and make his body move away from Damon and out.

Damon doesn't pull away until Alaric's opened the door of the house, until he spies the motion of Elena's greeting rush to welcome him. Alaric goes inside to the sound of squealing tires on the road and the impact of Elena's warm embrace.

Over the next few hours he will learn too many things. Like the night he was shot, only worse, Alaric awakens to a brutal new reality.

There will be no leaving this. There will be no end at Damon's tonight.

Maybe for too long. Ever. Damon's a Founding Family member. A-list. Prime target.

Damon won't understand, won't want to, and Alaric won't be able to explain. Damon will say, _It can't be, I've been with you,_ but they both know it hasn't always been true. Not every night. It should have been that but it hadn't been that yet.

Alaric may as well be back in purgatory.

From what they slowly reveal, it's where he belongs after all, despite the brief jailbreak from himself.

 


End file.
